Are Twitter Downvotes The Most Exciting Thing Since The Original iPhone? Elon Musk Agrees

A new Twitter Inc TWTR feature that will let users downvote tweets and replies has become a topic of high interest among the platform’s most influential users.

What Happened: Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, said he hadn’t been this excited about a new product since the launch of the original Apple Inc AAPL iPhone. His sentiments were shared by Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk.

Yeah

— Elona Musk (@elonmusk) March 16, 2022

The Context: Twitter began testing a feature to downvote replies in July 2021 and said it would be expanding the downvote option to tweets earlier this year.

“This experiment also revealed that downvoting is the most frequently used way for people to flag content they don’t want to see,” stated Twitter at the time.

Why It Matters: Users such as Musk and Andreessen, who have a bigger following, are likely to welcome the downvote option as a way to filter out unwanted content from their feed.

In January, billionaire investor Mark Cuban said he would pay Twitter for an option to filter hashtags and accounts because the amount of cryptocurrency spam on the platform was “out of control.”

I would pay Twitter for a hashtag and account filter. The crypto spam on here is out of control.

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) January 10, 2022

Musk, like Cuban, receives a number of calls to tweet about cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin DOGE/USD from members of the crypto community.

Price Action: Twitter shares closed 2.85% higher at a price of $33.97 on Tuesday.